zlacker

>>snewma+(OP)
If anybody wants to hear more about Doug's work and ideas, here is a (fairly long) interview with Doug by Lex Fridman, from last year.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3wMKoSRbGVs&pp=ygUabGV4IGZya...

>>mindcr+U4
Thanks for the link. I watched the first part, and an interesting story/claim is that before Cyc started, many "smart people" including Marvin Minsky came up with "~1 million" as the number of things you would have to encode in a system for it to have "common sense".

He said they learned after ~5 years that this was an order of magnitude off -- it's more like 10 M things.

Is there any literature about this? Did they publish?

To me, the obvious questions are -

- how do they know it's not 100M things?

- how do they know it's even bounded? Why isn't there a combinatorial explosion?

I mean I guess they were evaluating the system all along. You don't go for 38 years without having some clear metrics. But I am having some problems with the logic -- I'd be interested in links to references / criticism.

I'd be interested in any arguments for and against ~10 M. Naively speaking, the argument seems a bit flawed to me.

FWIW I heard of Cyc back in the 90's, but I had no idea it was still alive. It is impressive that he kept it alive for so long.

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Actually the wikipedia article is pretty good

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cyc#Criticisms

Though I'm still interested in the ~1M or ~10M claim. It seems like a strong claim to hold onto for decades, unless they had really strong metrics backing it up.